St. Matthias Lutheran Church (ELCA)

During my undergraduate years, I took a semester course in Geology, partly because I couldn’t hack Biology, but also because it fit conveniently into my schedule. I remember the course, not so much because we learned lots about rocks, but because of the promised “field trip” listed on the course syllabus. As it turns out, that trip was little more than a narrated hike from the classroom down along the dike at the shore of Lake Hartwell. We walked along that huge earthen dam which holds the lake back from flooding the lowest parts of the Clemson campus near the football practice fields. We walked on until we came as I remember, to a fence which meant I figured we had either taken a wrong turn or a boat was about to come and fetch us. It was then that the professor turned to us and said, “This concludes our tour. Don’t forget about your assignments and have a nice walk home.” I remember looking at the others as if in shock that we were being left, abandoned out there, wondering if there was no better plan for returning home than this.

I’ve pondered writing this letter with two thoughts in mind – one being the experience I’ve just shared with you of feeling abandoned. The other being a lecture in that same class when we discussed something called plate tectonics. Let me begin by telling you about the latter.

The lecture in plate tectonics aroused my curiosity because we learned something of the myriad of rock plates beneath the earth’s surface. It seems, and I’ve consulted an animated video on You Tube as a kind of refresher course on the subject, scientists believe that what we learned as being the seven continents have not always held that autonomous distinction. It is believed that over time and the as the earth’s core cools, there has been a perpetual shifting of the continental plates resulting in cataclysmic collisions as they both diverge from and converge with one another. Sometimes these collisions result in the lifting up of one another thus creating the rugged irregular beauty of mountain chains. In other places, the battle of converging plates force less dense plates downward toward the earth’s core.

In my own odd sort of way, this is part of my thinking as I listen to Bishop Mark Hanson offer pastoral reflection following our most recent Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis. His words (transcript included herein) seek to acknowledge and embrace the immensely wide diversity of feelings and confusion in the wake of ministry policy decisions. Some rejoice at having been lifted up, others are reeling, feeling abandoned by their church and left somewhere as if on a dike to find their own way home. There are no easy answers to the dilemmas we face as the Church. Yet, as Hanson concludes, “We finally meet one another not in our agreements or our disagreements, but at the foot of the cross, where God is faithful, where Christ is present with us, and where, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are one in Christ.”

God alone knows what churchwide decisions may mean to our life together. Clearly some will be affected more than others. But as one body in Christ, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1 Cor 12:26) Toss into the mix the feelings about we process hold share in our particular contexts – the grief of loss at the departure of beloved staff members like Judi Key and Nancy Owens; the awkward uneasy feeling during transition while search committees devote themselves prayerfully to their work – stir gently and hold lovingly together all of these things and what you have is the life of God’s beloved people. Frederick Buechner wrote an eloquent description of the church using the metaphor of Noah’s Ark. He writes, “It might have been smelly and crowded down there in the hull of that boat, but the folks inside knew well it was better to be on board than not.” All things considered, thanks be to God, it’s still good to be the church together.

Pastor Alan